were just as jealous, and ladies' honors at least as inexpugnable, as
in the land of demureness and duennas. Don Guzman took the hint well
enough, and kept on good terms with the country gentlemen as with their
daughters; and to tell the truth, the cunning soldier of fortune found
his account in being intimate with all the ladies he could, in order to
prevent old Salterne from fancying that he had any peculiar predilection
for Mistress Rose.

Nevertheless, Mr. Salterne's parlor being nearest to him, still remained
his most common haunt; where, while he discoursed for hours about

"Antres vast and deserts idle,
And of the cannibals that each other eat,
Of Anthropophagi, and men whose heads
Do grow beneath their shoulders,"

to the boundless satisfaction of poor Rose's fancy, he took care to
season his discourse with scraps of mercantile information, which kept
the old merchant always expectant and hankering for more, and made it
worth his while to ask the Spaniard in again and again.

And his stories, certainly, were worth hearing. He seemed to have been
everywhere, and to have seen everything: born in Peru, and sent home to
Spain at ten years old; brought up in Italy; a soldier in the Levant; an
adventurer to the East Indies; again in America, first in the islands,
and then in Mexico. Then back again to Spain, and thence to Rome, and
thence to Ireland. Shipwrecked; captive among savages; looking down the
craters of volcanoes; hanging about all the courts of Europe; fighting
Turks, Indians, lions, elephants, alligators, and what not? At
five-and-thirty he had seen enough for three lives, and knew how to make
the best of what he had seen.

He had shared, as a lad, in the horrors of the memorable siege of
Famagusta, and had escaped, he hardly knew himself how, from the hands
of the victorious Turks, and from the certainty (if he escaped being
flayed alive or impaled, as most of the captive officers were) of ending
his life as a Janissary at the Sultan's court. He had been at the Battle
of the Three Kings; had seen Stukely borne down by a hundred lances,
unconquered even in death; and had held upon his knee the head of the
dying King of Portugal.

And now, as he said to Rose one evening, what had he left on earth, but
a heart trampled as hard as the pavement? Whom had he to love? Who loved
him? He had nothing for which to live but fame: and even that was denied
to him, a prisoner in a foreign la